ARC OF A FAILED DEAL

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JERUSALEM There were late-night video conferences with Secretary of State John Kerry, including one from beneath mosquito netting in an Indonesian hotel. Kerry met a total of 34 times with President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority, and about twice that with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.

In the past few weeks, even as both sides took steps that undermined the process, Kerry and his team produced a new package of incentives, including Palestinian autonomy for planning and zoning in Israeli-controlled parts of the West Bank. All sides left a meeting last Tuesday optimistic.

The talks nonetheless collapsed two days later. Kerry has his share of the blame, at times leaving Israeli and Palestinian leaders with disparate understandings that would lead to later blowups and, toward the end, pushing beyond the White House's comfort zone to create a new layer of internal negotiations that slowed events down.

But Netanyahu refused to risk alienating Israel's right wing by restraining construction in West Bank and East Jerusalem settlements; about 13,000 new units moved forward during the talks. Abbas, looking for a dignified exit from the public stage and furious over the settlement building, never responded to the ideas Kerry's team had formulated for a framework to guide further negotiations.

Ultimately, the latest round proved the perennial truth with Middle East peacemaking: Washington cannot force an agreement if the parties are unwilling.

“It's part of the pathology of the Israeli-Palestinian relationship that what one side demands the other side has a predisposition to reject,” said a U.S. official knowledgeable about the negotiations, speaking on the condition of anonymity under White House dictate. “It's one of the reasons that it's so difficult to sustain negotiations, never mind get an agreement.”

Kerry set the lofty goal last July “to achieve a final-status agreement over the course of the next nine months.” Instead, as that deadline passed Tuesday, Israeli and Palestinian leaders were preparing a battery of punitive measures and unilateral steps that could spiral into the dissolution of the Palestinian Authority, bringing one of the world's most intractable conflicts to a new low.

After the pact signed last week by the PLO and the militant Islamic faction Hamas led Israel to halt the talks, President Barack Obama said Friday it may be time for a pause in American intervention.

“I've been going through some soul-searching: Why, if we both say two-state solution, what's gone wrong?” Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, asked in an interview Monday. “My only answer is we have failed to sit and agree on a map on borders of the two states. Everything else will be a domino effect.”

Erekat's Israeli counterpart, Tzipi Livni, acknowledged that continued settlement construction was a problem but said the Palestinians knew it was coming. Twice in April, she pointed out, even as details of new deals were being completed, the Palestinians surprised Israel and Washington, first by joining 15 international conventions to protest Israel's failure to release a promised fourth batch of prisoners, and last week by reconciling with Hamas.

“When you make an agreement with somebody, if he says to you, ‘Listen, I'm going to pay, but it's going to take some time,' ” Livni said, “if you want the deal and if you really want to continue negotiations, you wait.”

The nine-month talks, likened from the beginning to a pregnancy, broke roughly into three trimesters. First were about 20 bilateral meetings in which both Israeli and Palestinian negotiators failed to budge from their opening, maximalist positions. Then, after settlement announcements prompted the resignation of one Palestinian negotiator, those unproductive sessions were replaced in November with so-called proximity talks between each side and the Americans, focused on the framework. Finally, starting in March, the goal was truncated to simply extending the talks.

Joining Erekat at first was Mohammed Shtayyeh, an economist (he was later replaced by Majid Faraj, the intelligence chief). The Israeli side was led by Livni, Israel's justice minister, and Isaac Molho, Netanyahu's discreet lawyer. Tal Becker, on loan from Israel's foreign ministry, and Waseem Khazmo, Erekat's lawyer, sat in on all sessions, and Michael Herzog, a retired Israeli general, joined midstream.

The first turning point came Nov. 5. After the second of Israel's four promised batches of prisoners were released, amid anguished protests in Jerusalem, various plans for nearly 20,000 settlement units were pushed forward over five days (some were later withdrawn). The Palestinians were outraged not only at the scale, but that Israelis were suggesting they had agreed to trade construction for prisoners, when in fact the “price” was a pledge not to join international agencies and conventions for the duration of the talks.

At a negotiating session in a Jerusalem suburb, Erekat pulled from his bag the computer disk he always carried containing accession papers and threatened to join 15 conventions “tomorrow.” He and Shtayyeh drove directly to Bethlehem to submit their resignations (only Shtayyeh's was accepted).

Kerry condemned the construction, asking in a television interview, “How can you say we're planning to build in the place that will eventually be Palestine?”

Netanyahu suggested shifting to separate talks with the Americans, with the idea that the Israeli and Palestinian publics might more easily swallow a third round of prisoner releases and settlement announcements if they came with substantive progress. In a sign of progress, Abbas suggested that the Israeli military could remain in the West Bank for five years and then be replaced by either NATO or U.S. troops. Israel did delay settlement after December's prisoner release, but only for the few days of a Kerry visit.

It was Feb. 19, at the five-star Hotel Le Meurice in Paris, that Kerry's team began to believe their mission was doomed. Abbas, who is 79, told Kerry he had been battling a cold for two weeks and was “very stressed.” The two men talked for two hours but got nowhere. A month later at the White House, Obama offered the framework outlines – although no document was ever shared – and Abbas did not respond.

“He had shut down,” said one of several U.S. officials interviewed. “As he comes to the end of his life and certainly the end of his term in office, he's fed up.”

“His experience in the last nine months, of settlements gone wild,” this official added, “has just, I think, convinced him that he doesn't have a partner.”

As the March 29 deadline approached for releasing the final prisoners, a lingering problem re-emerged. Kerry had allowed the Palestinians to believe Arab-Israeli citizens would be among those freed without securing such a commitment from Netanyahu. The Israelis said no one would be let go unless talks were extended.

Kerry dangled the prospect of freeing Jonathan J. Pollard, the American convicted of spying for Israel, despite White House reservations. But on April 1, even as Netanyahu was gathering votes for the new deal, an old tender for 708 apartments in East Jerusalem's Gilo, was republished. Soon Abbas was on television signing documents to join the international conventions.

Still they kept talking. Negotiators barely slept for three weeks. Last Tuesday, the latest package was presented at a meeting variously described as “serious,” “positive” and “excellent.”

“We had ups and downs: One day if you would ask me I would tell you it's going to happen, the next day I would tell you it's not going to happen,” one Israeli said. That Tuesday, he added, “we felt maybe we are going to make it. They asked, ‘Let's meet the next day.' ”

But the next day, PLO leaders held hands aloft with those from Hamas. Israel immediately canceled the scheduled negotiating session, and 24 hours later, froze talks indefinitely.

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